July, 2008
by Tom Confrey
The Connecticut CMG Region recently held its Spring Membership Meeting and continued its tradition of having it coincide with its Annual Vendor Day. We had a very good turnout with themes that allowed attendees to increase their skills and knowledge in capacity planning, virtualization, and enterprise systems management. Connecticut has always been a popular stop for speakers, especially in the spring, and this meting was no different. Speakers included the two 2007 CMG Mullen Award winners Peg McMahon and Michael Salsburg, past A.A. Michelson Award winner Ray Wicks, as well as seasoned speakers Peter Weilnau, and Catherine Liu.
Each April, CCMG invites vendors to display their products and services to our membership in addition to the technical presentations from invited speakers. (A mini CMG conference, if you will.) This allows an opportunity to engage in discussions with vendors during registration, between sessions and after lunch. We welcomed the following vendors and thank them for their support.
AES, AQM Solutions, Aternity, BMC Software, Compuware, IBM Tivoli, Integrien, ISM, Perfcap Pawz, Sysload Software, TeamQuest
The morning featured four sessions scheduled over a dual track. The Capacity Planning Track featured Ray Wicks of IBM for both sessions. Ray gave a two-part presentation aptly titled, Getting Started with Capacity Planning Part 1 and Part 2. This two part session, introduced some of the basic concepts in Capacity Planning and then moved to some basic views of performance data, discussed how performance data can be organized by a data model (a conceptual structure). The data model identifies data to track over time which can lend itself to some trending analysis and leading to the first step towards a capacity plan. He also included a set of definitions (performance metrics), a quick view of expectations from queuing theory, and a simple capacity plan. Ray made his presentations quite interesting with real-life examples. His sense of humor and dry wit did not go unnoticed in this New England state.
The first session in the Open Systems Track featured Dr. Michael Salsburg from Unisys with a presentation entitled, Beyond the Hypervisor Hype. Don't let the "Doctor" in his name fool you, Mike is a very dynamic speaker and gave a great performance (err, we mean, presentation). He started off with a simple model of today's hypervisors and then discussed a set of benchmarks that have been published by VMware and XenSource. The performance implications of the benchmark results were also discussed. As there are newly emerging virtualization enhancements appearing on processor vendor roadmaps, Mike discussed the motivation for these, plus some insights into the announced enhancements. He also talked about the effect of server virtualization on the role of capacity planning.
The second session in the Open Systems Track featured Pete Weilnau from ISM with a very interesting presentation called, Understanding the AIX Performance Data in an IBM APV Partition. IBM's Advanced POWER Virtualization introduces a powerful virtualization layer to the POWER platform. Pete gave a very interesting and timely presentation regarding this subject. He covered a lot of ground with much of the information uncovered while he was spelunking through the documentation as well as real world experimentation in AIX environments running in various configurations of APV partitioning. Pete also discussed helpful specifics as well as how to include and interpret specific data values provided by performance tools like iostat, lparstat and topas.
The afternoon sessions were proceeded by a sit-down lunch with dessert and coffee served in the vendor exhibition area. The afternoon was set up as sequential single sessions because the topics were appropriate for all attendees.
First up was Peg McMahon from Sprint Nextel with a presentation entitled, Death to Dashboards: Alarming, Performance Management Based on Variance, System Prioritization and Other Thoughts on Data Visualization. Fortunately, Peg's engaging speaking style (and, of course, interesting topic) was able to ward off any potential somnolent effects that might have been in play from the great meal and desserts. We have all had discussions on thresholds - what upper and lower limits to use, when to turn the light from yellow to red on the executive dashboard, when to order new hardware, etc. Peg presented a theory that thresholds might have worked well in the days of a handful of beloved systems, but for today's complex environments the use of thresholds is not only painful to manage but conceptually bankrupt. (Yes, conceptually bankrupt.) She discussed the problems with thresholds and dashboards using real examples and also delved into work she was doing to identify practical alternatives.
The final session of the day was reserved for Catherine Liu of AES. She is strong supporter of CMG regions and a very interesting speaker who is always a favorite in Connecticut. (Why else would we give her the final slot on a Friday afternoon spring day?) Almost every one stayed for the final session and Catherine did not disappoint. Her presentation was Mainframe Virtualization and Network Management which covered mainframe and open systems virtualization environments. Both of these environments require on-going network management starting with diagnosing network connectivity to setup of service level objectives and monitoring. As we all know, the increasing use of virtual servers running Linux Systems requires ongoing monitoring, reporting and alerting of the availability and performance of specific services. Catherine talked about the non-stop monitoring and reporting requirement on network Service Level performance, response times, and application workloads that are essential for z/OS-hosted TCP/IP activity and for guest z/OSs under z/VM. She also discussed the challenges and demonstrated sample solutions. It was quite clear how a well managed z/OS TCP/IP environment will return growth in the virtualization infrastructure, providing more sub-capacity for other z/OS LPARs or Linux guests. Although Catherine has a very strong network background her insight into the business issues of companies was very interesting and helped put things in perspective.
Please visit the following link for more details on our next meeting http://regions.cmg.org/regions/ctcmg/next_meeting.html or visit our homepage at http://regions.cmg.org/regions/ctcmg/ for more information about our region.